Blekko Rivals Google with Crowd-sourced Search

Blekko Nov. 1 launched to public beta to challenge Google, Bing and Yahoo with a curated search engine geared to pare spam.

Blekko Nov. 1 became the latest startup to challenge
Google with a search engine that lets its users customize and refine searches to
can some of the spam.
Machine-generated search engines such as Google, Yahoo
and Bing take users' queries and search for these digital needles of
information in an increasingly expanding haystack of billions of Web pages.

Blekko
tries a crowd-sourced approach to search results to help users better
pinpoint answers. Any user may test the Blekko beta with a feature
called
slashtags, which group the search queries people define on Blekko
within the search
box.

Slashtags, which users may try here,
search only the sites users want, cutting cut out spam. The tools are not unlike
the hashtag feature (#) that lets Twitter users group tweets around a
particular topic, such as #world series.
Users can create their own slashtags, allowing them to
set up directories of information in a few vertical areas so that they can come
back to them later and let other people see them.
"Use friends, experts, community or your own
slashtags to slash in what you want and slash out what you don't," Blekko
explained on its Website. Users may also search from these boxes and jump to
other verticals.

Search Engine Land has the most detailed run-through of Blekko here.
Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta offered an example of a logical Blekko use on his
personal blog Nov. 1.
Skrenta was looking for a 2 percent cash-back credit card. A search for [cash back credit card] produced spammed
results on Google and Bing, so he made the blekko /money tag [cash back credit
card /money] with the top 100 personal finance bloggers and received great
results.
Noting that search requires a lot of relevance data to
help algorithms grok the billions of Web pages worldwide, Skrenta said that he
wanted to use the crowd-sourced approach to make the "search engine
better" instead of following Google and Bing's lead of hiring hundreds of
contractors to refine relevance data.